> No one is held back by bash or POSIX. You are free to use anything that suits your fancy. Feel free to whip out scripts in Python or Perl or Ruby. The point

> No one is held back by bash or POSIX. You are free to use anything that suits your fancy. Feel free to whip out scripts in Python or Perl or Ruby. The point is that there are many improvements that could be made to bash which would retain the good properties but would get rid of the worst footguns and suckiness. Quite a number of these (though not all) have been available for decades in the form of zsh. Also, as pointed out already in another comment, bash is not in POSIX at all. POSIX is very much a "lowest common denominator"-kind of specification which moves at geological speeds. Even dash and busybox sh implement some non-POSIX features.